"To get on a renewable energy path or a soft energy path as Amory Lovins would say, is of enormous importance for us and again the natural tendency is to want to say well you know, you rich people at the top of the pyramid, especially Americans, you need to get your act together, you know you need to cut your energy consumption, stopping driving the big SUV ... and all of that's true, right, but it's primarily guilt tripping, right which I don't think has proven to be very effective, it's not a very effective means of accomplishing the goal..."

"So I think what makes this appealing to people is that they can actually see where the enterprise based approach you know, through an actual investment that's profit oriented, I mean there's ... imagine the world's large corporations of the world dedicating 5% of their investment capital in this..."

"So beyond greening is all about next generation inherently clean, sustainable technology and serving the underserved. Those become the key strategies for tomorrow..."

"So why would we expect this technology to come in at the top of the pyramid first. In my view, it's the last place you know, where we're going to see it for all these reasons because of it's disruptive nature..."

"Well, if I think about the underlying root cause of terrorism as a behavior, it's important to think about terrorism as a behavior. People aren't born terrorists, I mean they're not. People are not born terrorists. Maybe a few are, right..."

"A key when it comes to beyond greening and being able to land it on the ground successfully, in my view, is what I call getting to the, even the next generation of beyond, beyond greening would be what I call becoming indigenous..."

"You know, two to two and half billion people really don't have dependable light at night and how do they secure it today, they secure it through candles, kerosene lanterns, dry cell batteries, maybe if there's you know, enough capital to combine you can get a diesel generator but that's much rare. Generally at the household scale, it's going to be what I just described, candles, kerosine lanterns, dry cell battery driven light..."

"So I find it actually quite interesting that in the US now, you see in the government more and more interested in this idea, the Army War College and the Pacific Command has a program on addressing the root cause of terrorism. The state department has a new program called economic empowerment for strategic regions and to me the only way we come to grips with this ultimately is through sustainable development, right..."

"And so the best way that we can think about beyond greening is to do it as a co-creation process that rather than simply trying to deploy, right, kind of design and deploy, we think more about getting on the ground, developing a relationship, learning and understanding and then jointly developing new businesses and solutions from that..."

"With current technology, it's not fundamentally a technology problem. Now, there'll be continued technological innovations that will bring the cost down and the case becomes even more persuasive, but you have an NGO for example called Light up the World, Canadian NGO started by an engineering professor at the University of Calgary, really interesting little NGO and he has basically figured out how over the last 10 years how to assemble a rural lighting system out of existing components..."

"They weren't designed for that space and if we persist in using them kind of like roaring in there in SUVs, trying to do market surveys and you know, consumer surveys and focus groups that not only will it be perceived as affrontive and extractive, but we're probably gonna get bad information. We do get bad information generally..."

"It is, that appropriate technology is still a term that gets used that, to me one of the distinctions between this, the idea that I'm talking about here and the old idea, I shouldn't say old, but the 70s notion of appropriate technology, implicit in the appropriate technology movement was low tech and that appropriate technology meant low tech, simple, you know, cheap and it was always assumed that in order for it to be simple and cheap and usable and durable, it had to be low tech..."

"So first lesson, you have to optimize the technology for what the early needs are, you know what the real needs are and not necessarily just the top of the pyramid needs. So a lot of it is technology optimization and then it's systems thinking that if you want light at night then it makes sense to leap to the most advanced lighting systems, not to go back to incandescent bulbs which are you know, energy inefficient and contribute to climate change problems and greenhouse gas emissions..."

"The protocol which took us about a year and a half to design this with a group of 40 was done through a workshopping approach where we involved people from a wide variety of fields, anthropology, rural development, empathy based design, and a variety of others. So, it bakes in a lot of the pre-existing knowledge and things like participatory rural appraisal and quick ethnography, rapid assessment processes, empathy based design, and those kinds of pre-existing methods into a business process..."

"The next one to shatter I think is this idea that somehow the only way that we can really be local, really be native to a place is with low tech and with just locally based NGOs and with small scale companies..."

"It's the most expensive and it's also the most toxic with roll to roll batteries coming on quite rapidly, but anyway Light up the World was able to put together these components into a rural lighting system and then used micro finance, micro credit, right 'cause let's face it, a household in the rural area that earns $500 a year in income can't afford one of these systems even though they're looking at pricing it around $50-60 retail..."

"So there's an action research platform built around that. So the base of the pyramid area is one of our core platform areas and as I mentioned before they are now going at a dozen base of the pyramid learning laboratories around the world and we're trying to network those together into a global learning lab network around base of the pyramid..."

"These are the big problems that need to be solved and it is not clear that government is going to be able to take this on by themselves. That's not clear at all..."

"You can always add cost and features on to a low cost platform. It's much more difficult to take cost out of a high cost platform and try to trickle it down. So this great leap idea right, is the way you combine the idea of next generation inherently clean technology with serving the base of the pyramid and then you can imagine trickling it up over time, so initially it's all about creative creation..."

"So, a much bigger opportunity to blend the idea of clean technology in the base of the pyramid together through new kinds of commercialization strategies. So, the Sustainable Innovation Learning Laboratory is focused around how do we bring, how do you make the case for these next generation inherently clean technologies within an existing large corporation..."

"It began to occur to us that, well wow... you know, I mean what's missing and what's really needed is how does the corporate sector begin to really think about the actual bottom of the income pyramid..."

"As great as Light up the World is, they can't possibly bring this to scale in a way that's going to make that much of an impact. So this is precisely why Philips has now gotten interested in it and they're partnering with Light up the World. So this kind of brings home my earlier point that the innovation has really come from the NGOs and from the companies in the developing world."

"So, the Sustainable Innovation Learning Laboratory is focused around those kinds of issues and again we've got companies that are involved in that that's kind of an affiliates program and there's now a developing applied research platform flowing off of that and we're able to bring that then into the classroom as well..."

"We kind of made a decision that we were going to refer to it as the base of the pyramid starting around 2000 and 2001 simply because you know, you get push back about this idea, the bottom of the pyramid, sounds kind of pejorative..."

"This is where the multinationals can actually learn and those are the natural partners, but I think one of the greatest fears is that, oh, these big multinationals come in and they're going to put all of these local companies out of business. I think quite the contrary, they're the natural partners..."

"If it was at a crossroads back in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, it's really at a crossroads now because unless the capitalists of the world you know the enterprises of the world can figure out how to include you know, the other four and half billion people of the world and how to do it in a way not only doesn't just increasingly destroy the natural capital base but in fact do it in a way that begins to regenerate the natural capital base then I don't see a very bright future for either global capitalism or the global economy..."

"So already we're beginning to see backlash on this idea which should be totally predictable. In fact we anticipated it going back 3-4 years with this base of the pyramid protocol that I mentioned earlier..."

"No multinational has the capability themselves today. They just don't have it right, so they require local partners but they have convening power. They have the ability to be catalytic and then the ability to kind of role this stuff out, right, on potentially a world scale, so if we're going to have the kind of impact we need in terms of shifting right, kind of turning the ship that's the way it happens in my view."